


Consequentialism

by IamShadow21



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: A Bit Not Good, Gen, John Watson Has Watched Too Much Macgyver, John Watson Is A BAMF, Not NHS Approved, PTSD, Self-Harm, Sherlock Holmes Deduces You Whether You Like It Or Not, Suicidal Thoughts, You Can Be Fucked Up Without Being A Woobie, You Can Mend Anything With Duct Tape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-18
Updated: 2011-06-18
Packaged: 2017-10-20 12:40:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John decides to take things into his own hands, so to speak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consequentialism

Doctors make the worst patients. It's a cliché spoken with a knowing smirk, usually by people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

The truth is, that in a grossly understaffed field hospital, a semi-conscious doctor running a raging fever is better than nothing. That's why John Watson is on his feet, holding the patient in the bed next to him in the recovery position with his one good arm while the man jerks and twitches his way through another seizure. The thin stream of vomit from the man's lips stains the sheets, but at least it's not going down his airway.

John may be one unlucky bastard, but Private Dobman has a nasty head injury and an undeniable case of cranial swelling. Too bad the nearest neurosurgeon is hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

The trembling subsides, the staff arrive and John is hustled back to bed. He gets scolded firmly, but John doesn't think he misreads the exhausted gratitude under the bluster. He doesn't think it's a coincidence, either, that the patients that come after Dobman always seem to be unstable, to need that little bit more care and attention than the nurses can afford them. It gives him a purpose through the weeks of sweats and occasional delirium and bastard anti-virals that are nearly as bad as the post-op infection in and of themselves.

***

The halfway house squats sullenly between a railway line and a major road. The rest of the block is taken up with small businesses and squalid tenements. It's a mishmash of architecture, dictated by the haphazard demolition squads of Messerschmitts that flew the skies over London six decades ago.

It's not a nice part of town.

There are squalling chavs all day, sirens in the evening and goods trains going by through the early hours till dawn.

John quite likes it, as far as he can feel enough to like anything right now. If he pretends hard enough, the din morphs into the familiar sounds of barked commands, jets wailing, and the thuds of distant shelling. And with those to soothe him, John Watson can sleep anywhere.

***

The specialist is brusque to the point of being rude. He's silver at the temples, soft around the waist and has a chunky gold watch slipping up and down his wrist that would be bling if he was black but instead only serves to highlight the tasteless, middle aged, middle class white man that he is. John suspects career burnout, and amuses himself looking for the symptoms rather than letting the man's words impact on him emotionally.

“...nerve damage...”

Picture on the bookshelf of a four-seater convertible, his specialist in the driver's seat with a shit-eating grin. John recalls Jeremy Clarkson's comments on that style of car and those who drive them, and suppresses a smirk.

“...may recover some sensation in time, but in these kinds of injuries, particularly with post-operative complications, effects are likely to be permanent...”

Trophy on the filing cabinet. Golf, from the looks of it, probably some kind of doctors' amateur league. Likely the only kind of battle this bland pudding of a man has ever taken part in.

“And my leg?” John asks, interrupting what was likely to be another repetition of disheartening predictions.

John has theories about his leg. About muscle wastage, about viral attacks on nerve bundles, about misaligned vertebrae from the initial traumatic injury and his hasty evacuation from the firefight, dragged over shattered ground.

His theories don't allow for the specialist's hesitation, the slightly distasteful pursing of his lips.

“I can't help you with that,” the hateful man dismisses, and hands John the number of a therapist.

***

Cleaning his gun is something John has done daily, like clockwork, since being issued his first firearm. It's something he could do behind his back, something he _has_ done in the dark, and something he regularly thought he was doing when his fever spiked its highest back in hospital.

Getting a pistol once he got back to England wasn't an idle wish or an act of paranoia so much as a necessity. It was remarkably easy, too. Nothing illegal, nothing immoral, just a few words to the right old pal in the service and a brand new Browning and a licence for its ownership in his name were delivered promptly. If only everything in life was as simple as buying lethal weaponry.

He disassembles the piece down to its component parts in an embarrassingly long time. It's not so much that he's out of practice. The muscle memory is so ingrained that he could likely still strip a gun at the age of ninety even if he never did it again in the interim. Rather, it's his numb, clumsy fingers that are letting him down.

The third time his hand fails to tighten around the grip and it slips to the table, he leaves it where it is and makes himself a cup of tea, then sits on the edge of the bed and lets his mind go blank. The bellows turn to sirens as the light drains from the sky, and he keeps taking tiny sips from the cup long after it goes cold.

Then he tries again.

***

For all that everyone thinks that his limp is in his head, it's real enough to send him sprawling on the floor when he moves about the bedsit without his cane.

He catches himself on his bad arm, and the jolt of pain isn't just bad, it's enough to make his ears sing and the edges of his vision dim a little for a few seconds. It's a bolt of raw agony from his mangled shoulder down to his fingertips.

 _That's interesting_ , he thinks, when the pain has ebbed enough to gulp in a breath.

For a little while longer, he lies curled on his side on the floor, waiting for his heart rate to stop racing and for the sweat to cool on his brow. For the first time in weeks, his brain is ticking over with tests, with _possibilities_.

If shouting is all his body seems to understand, John Watson intends to scream his loudest at it.

***

John's sensory testing kit is definitely not NHS approved or funded, but it does have the benefit of having cost under ten pounds at the nearest Tesco's. In his sadly reduced circumstances, what most people would consider small change, isn't.

He lines up his supplies in an orderly row. He's waited until the goods trains started rumbling past for this. If one of the more _extreme_ tests he's got planned does get through the numbness, he'd rather a shout from him went unheard than piqued the curiosity of a 'helpful' neighbour.

He's methodical about it, so it's easy enough to convince himself that it isn't self-harm for some pitiful, post-traumatic reason his new therapist would like to know all about. It's for science. He draws himself up a check-list on A4 paper and marks zones on his arm in permanent marker and everything, before he even reaches for the ice cubes.

It's only later, when he's meticulously swabbing the constellations of minor cuts, bruises and burns that he wonders whether planning it out so efficiently is a worrying sign in and of itself. He brushes that away as swiftly as he can, focussing instead on the newly amassed data in front of him. Areas of sensitivity, areas of numbness. Areas that feel pressure but not cold, touch but not pain. Areas that feel nothing of the external input he gives them, but feel tingling when areas nearby are stimulated. His arm is like a tangled mess of crossed wires, firing off signals in all the wrong directions, if at all.

It's better than nothing.

He adds sensory testing to his daily regime. The burns take the longest to heal.

***

Long-sleeved shirts become his wardrobe choice for the daylight hours, despite the clement weather. He doesn't want to worry his therapist any more than he already is, just by being himself. She keeps writing down notes that include words like _guarded_ , _inappropriate or absent affect_ , and _dissociative?_ The last thing he needs is her labelling him a 'cutter' and sending him to group therapy with disaffected teens and suicidal headcases.

He curls and uncurls his weak hand in his lap while she's talking, about blogging, of all things. It helps kill the tremor that's developed since he started his home brand of PT. It's an annoying symptom that makes people look at him with pity when he fumbles with his cash card or small change.

A young woman on the Tube sympathises, mistaking his limp and trembling hand for symptoms of MS. He doesn't correct her, knowing the public feeling on the war runs pretty high. Her own cane is cheerfully striped purple and marigold, and she wields it like an extra limb, speaking of a long association with mobility aids and a patronising wider population. John stays on the train three stops past his own station, revelling in the sensation of talking to someone who talks bluntly and honestly about the realities of 'living as a gimp' and doesn't even hint at prognosis.

She leaves him with a bushel of tips for survival in London, everything from where the staff were polite (or rude) to where the accessible loos were (and which you could count on to be clean) to which GPs were worth visiting and which he should 'limp away from screaming'.

He's watched the woman's station slide away into the dark before he realises that she never told him her name. He was too busy being quietly intrigued and cataloguing the details of this 'club' that he's suddenly been granted membership to by virtue of a walking stick and a tremor.

***

John has got the time it takes to break his gun down to under two minutes, but seems to hit a wall at that. His fumbling fingers aren't completely numb any more, but have an unpleasant pins-and-needles tingling that spikes into pain when he grips things tightly or moves too quickly. It's good, he knows it is, it's progress. The burn on the fleshy muscle at the base of his thumb even hurts a bit, like an unpleasant itch too deep to scratch.

It doesn't stop him pulling out his box of ammunition and lining the bullets up around his table like toy soldiers, like dominos. A whole regimented row of morbid possibilities.

He makes a cup of tea, then sits in front of the bullets and drinks it. The gun sits in the centre; sleek, clean, as yet unfired.

A nudge from his finger and the bullets topple in a volley of percussive thuds and roll across the table, into his lap, onto the floor.

***

The firing range becomes a weekly treat, an extravagance that he explains away to himself as therapy, simply because of the way it quells the tremor in his hand and fills his head with blessed silence. Sensation's still a fickle thing that comes and goes, and the kick of the pistol jolts his weakened shoulder, but he's soon firing killshots with every round. Then it loses its savour. Punching holes in paper is nothing like fighting for your life, and John walks away from the range and into the nearest betting shop.

Throwing away his meagre money on horses is still a waste he can scarcely afford that leaves his stomach full of bitter bile after the comedown. Still, there's the empty promise of winnings, which the firing range and his newly created blog just don't offer. It stops him focussing on the looming expiration of the bedsit's lease, and the slow but mortal bleeding out of his bank account. His new second-hand phone weighs down his pocket like an accusation. John just asks for a ticket for the next race, and goes home with an empty wallet.

He burns a small hole on the inside of his wrist just to feel it tingle in his little finger, which is still annoyingly numb. The blister is red and white and irritating, rubbing against his cuff, and he used his last plasters yesterday. John presses on the burn with the flat of his right thumb until he can feel the pain in his teeth, and his whole left hand is aflame. He's panting with the effort when he releases his grip, but it's something, something. He squeezes his left hand, relaxes it, squeezes it again, feels the shadow of normal sensation. It stutters, fades, trembles, quiets.

In the distance, a train rattles over a set of points at speed, and John imagines it's mortar fire.

***

The next two days, he stays in. He doesn't gamble, he doesn't ring Harry, he doesn't go to the firing range. He stares at the cursor blinking on his blog. He cleans his gun, stripping it down in a minute and a half. He plays umpteen card games on the refurbished laptop that he received from a veteran's charity.

He goes to his therapist's appointment the next day because she phones him if he doesn't turn up, and while he hates sitting in a room saying nothing, being on the phone saying nothing is worse.

 _Nothing happens to me_ , he writes later.

***

The scars are pale and faded by the time Sherlock sees them. This has a lot to do with the fact that they met in the middle of winter, and a great deal to do with the amount of care John takes to keep his sleeves down.

However, when there's an injury that he really can't deal with himself, he doesn't have much of a choice. It's a ragged, shallow gash along his ribs that doesn't need stitches but hurts like a bitch and is bleeding enough every time he moves to be a nuisance.

“Could you..?” John asks.

Sherlock doesn't answer, but bends in close, taking the butterfly tape and gauze and antiseptic as he needs them from John's hands. He's efficient and quick, and John can tell when he lowers his arm that it won't come loose in a hurry.

“Thank you.”

Sherlock's still staring, brow slightly furrowed in thought. John's been expecting this, and he sits back and allows it. Waits for the prodding and the questions, maybe even requests for further study. It is quite impressive, as scars go.

But then Sherlock's moving on, moving close, looking down the landscape of John's left arm, and John self-consciously moves his hand palm-downwards, hiding the worst of the damage.

Sherlock's thumb curls under John's hand as if to turn it, and John flinches minutely, and it's enough, too much. Sherlock's looking him in the eye now, not questioning, but no doubt _deducing_. John lets out a breath, and turns his hand over himself, remembering another Holmes, another place.

“Go on,” he says gruffly.

Sherlock's fingers are impersonal but more gentle than John had assumed they would be. He takes his time cataloguing the marks that scatter the pale skin. His thumb rubs once over the reddish scar on John's pulse point, the memento of that last burn, then takes John's right arm and gives it a cursory glace.

“I thought at first, torture,” Sherlock begins smoothly, as though this is just another case, another mystery. John supposes it is.

“But?” he prompts. Sherlock has gone back to lightly touching the scars.

“Only on one arm, unlikely, and clustered like this, very specific. This was done by someone with a knowledge of anatomy and a variety of implements. Plus, of course, they're all far too recent. Within the last two to three months at the outside. Angle and precision indicates they were self-inflicted with your non-dominant hand. You hid them well. I had no idea.”

Sherlock looks vaguely proud of him, as though John's a child who's done something clever.

“I never did it...here,” John falters.

Sherlock frowns a little and touches the mark on his wrist.

“Got infected. Took longer to heal,”John explains, and the crease unfolds. Sherlock hums contentedly, all the data acquired to satiate him, apparently. He stands.

John is baffled. “Aren't you going to ask why?” he asks as Sherlock turns away.

Sherlock turns back, visibly confused as to why it all needs to be verbalised. “Sensation. Numbness. Pain. You needed to feel.”

“Yes. Sort of. I did it properly,”John explains, but it sounds almost like pleading, like weakness. Like he's trying to excuse what he did, not that he needs to. “I had a reason.”

Sherlock sits in his chair and waves his hand dismissively at John's insistence. _Properly_ is rarely something Sherlock Holmes ever takes into consideration, except as a small picket fence to be stepped over when choosing to stomp all over the flowerbeds of convention.

“Never mind that. Did it work? Results are far more interesting.”

John thinks back to the days of numbness, the regimented allotment of pain, the gun, the hospital, the specialist with the convertible, the blog that's brimming with posts these days, and the therapist that he hasn't gone back to see in weeks. He thinks of his hand, rock steady as he shoots through a window, the mornings he wakes up and his leg hurts, the days he cuts himself shaving because his hand shakes, and the numbness and tingling he still gets in his last two fingers. He'll never be a surgeon again, or a marksman, or anything that requires consistent stability in his wayward hand, but he can count his change without embarrassing himself these days and sign his name without dropping the pen.

 _Healing and time_ , says his logical doctor's voice. The rest of him isn't so certain.

“I really don't know,” he says eventually.

Sherlock looks mildly disappointed.

John fumbles. “It wasn't...hysterical,” he tries to explain.

Sherlock looks almost offended. “Of course, it wasn't. Not that it would have mattered in the slightest if it had been.”

John wonders if this is Sherlock's version of _it's all fine_.

“I kept notes. Charts,” he offers, as the last card in his _I'm not crazy, am I?_ pack.

Sherlock looks instantly intrigued. “May I see them?”

John can see the wheels turning in Sherlock's head, grinding through the possible data to be gleaned from John's slightly extreme interpretation of _Physician, heal thyself_.

“Later,” John sighs. “Tea?”

Sherlock has already positioned himself for thinking and doesn't answer. John knows enough to make him one anyway.


End file.
